One of the most striking things about shooting incidents in
America...is how common they are. Another striking thing is how often the
media fails to note the previous point, or to explore what that means -- or
what might be done about it.

Late last night, a gunman walked into a movie theater in a Denver suburb, killed 12 and injured 50. Two days earlier a gunman opened fire outside a bar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in an incident in which at least 17 were hurt.
These were not really so exceptional. Every year, about 100,000
Americans are victims of gun violence, and every week, people calmly
enter our schools, our workplaces, our leisure gathering spots and open
fire on innocent bystanders.

Whenever we tweet or post about these, often the only people we hear from are those who say we need more guns
not less. "If I had been there with my gun..." The problem, of course,
is the public at large is being asked to arm everyone and trust that,
while the rest of us cower, "the right people" will quickly dispatch
"the wrong people" in the modern equivalent of the Shootout at the OK
Corral. No mention of whether the teacher is supposed to be armed...when a
nut walks into a preschool and starts firing away.

Meanwhile, the media doesn't have any answers at all. Each time such
an incident occurs, they primarily evince a morbid interest in the
grotesque details of the incident and the psycho of the day. In this
case, early indications were that the suspect in custody, James Holmes,
said to be a dropout from a medical school, had some kind of imagined
association with the film being shown, the Batman movie "The Dark Knight
Rises."

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And what is our response to all this? We were told that the president
was awakened at 5:25am by his counter-terrorism adviser. He then issued the following statement:

"As we do when confronted by moments of
darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American
family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in
our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends
and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging
hours and days to come."

Later, in a press conference, he said: "Such violence, such evil is senseless."

Romney, in a statement, said:

"Ann and I are deeply saddened by the
news of the senseless violence that took the lives of 15 people in
Colorado and injured dozens more. We are praying for the families and
loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense
grief. We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime
will be quickly brought to justice."

That's about the sum total of leadership these days. Avoid the core
issue, pray, and extend sympathies to the families of the victims. No
mention of systemic and endemic factors, or of taking action to prevent
this kind of tragedy in the future.

A Brutal Culture Begets Violence

In the case of the Tuscaloosa shooter, we had some useful particulars. But sadly, this kind of actionable information is just too "big picture" for us to contemplate:

"There were signs Wilkins' life was unraveling.

"He divorced from his wife of 16 years
around 2005 and a credit union last year tried to garnish wages at his
then-employer, Capstone Oilfield Services, to collect a more than
$15,000 debt but couldn't because he had declared bankruptcy. And the
co-owner of the FedEx store where Wilkins turned himself in said Wilkins
talked about being high on drugs during the shootings."

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From that, we can see that Wilkins was experiencing stresses and
crises. And at least some of them are related to the economic
difficulties most of us are facing. And those are caused, at least in
some cases, by greed and relentless pressure for profits, irrespective
of the harm to others. That is, stresses are not all our fault. The
ruthless bottom-line priorities of our society and the lack of
protections for consumers and workers are factors in people becoming
alienated and enraged. (We wrote a bit about regulating financial
excesses the other day -- you can read that here.)

Gun violence is also due, in part, to the power of gun
manufacturers -- which constitute way too big an industry altogether. While
it's surprisingly hard to find accurate totals on firearms production,
which in itself is troubling, according to a gun manufacturers' association,
even a decade ago American firms were pumping out more than 3 million
combined rifles, shotguns, revolvers and pistols in a single year. And
those numbers have been climbing.

That's a mind-boggling figure. Indeed, we live in a country where
firepower, both that held by individuals and by the state, is, frankly,
pretty deranged. No other country on earth so bristles with means of
killing -- and no other country thinks it is quite so healthy an
entertainment for us and our children to sit at a console for hours and
try to "kill" other people--including civilians.
No other country thinks it is moral behavior to use pilotless drones to
kill -- in large part -- people whose only crime is that they're young men of military age.